Living by Thoreau's Mill Brook

Mapping Thoreau’s Surveys

Objective: Create an index to allow Thoreau Surveys to be
searched by their geographic location as well as chronological date of
creation.

Geographic locations used are “Gleason zones” defined by the
row letters and column numbers that appear in the margins of Gleason’s 1906 Map
of Concord.

The resulting index when completed will allow users of the
Thoreau’s Surveys on-line in the Special Collections at the Concord Public
Library to be sorted and searched by location and/or date of creation.

This may be helpful for creating maps of Thoreau’s “journey
to work” as surveyor for different years or seasons.

Readers of Thoreau’s journals for various years may benefit
from a corresponding map for each year from 1846-1860 of where Thoreau was
walking in the fields as a surveyor.

After the index is complete and verified a publication will
be created with 14 maps plus commentary.

A prototype of such an index is available on-line at my blog
but note it is a work in progress.The
database is only a draft and questions, comments or suggestions are
appreciated.

The table shown is a cumulative count of Thoreau
Surveys 1846-1860.

Gleason
CDB Thoreau Surveys cumul 1846-1860

Rows/Cols

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

SUM

A

1

1

2

B

1

1

1

3

C

2

1

3

D

1

2

1

4

E

1

8

2

3

1

15

F

1

1

11

20

4

5

1

43

G

5

2

3

1

3

2

3

1

1

21

H

1

1

1

8

2

5

18

J

1

1

3

2

4

11

K

1

1

1

3

L

1

1

SUM

1

5

7

8

3

15

38

20

12

13

2

124

124

Note: CDB refers to “cartographic database” of x-y
coordinates. Similar tables are available for each individual year.